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By India Amos

Fans of the Lords football team will see new faces on McBride Field this Saturday afternoon when Kenyon takes on Denison University, and they won’t belong to members of the opposing team. Kenyon’s first cheering team will make its debut at the last football game of the season.

Co-Captains Kyra Green ’17 and Catie McGonagle ’17 founded the squad after they discussed the possibility of starting a cheering squad when they were auditioning for the Kenyon College Dance Team.

“Before the actual tryout, we all had to sit in a circle and say why we both wanted to be on the dance team, and we both said, ‘I’m a cheerleader but there’s no cheer team, so this is the closest thing to it,’” McGonagle said. Both McGonagle and Green decided to pursue pioneering a cheering team at Kenyon.

“We would rather do something we were more passioniate about and, thus, the cheering team was born,” Green said.

McGonagle and Green are joined by Chrisie Appleby ’17, who serves as the team’s treasurer, Camisha James ’18, Alexa Kato ’16 and Paige Smearman ’16. The team has been practicing for six hours a week for the past two months, and while they are still new, they feel prepared to cheer their first game.

“We’re [definitely] not what we’re going to be next year, and I think next year we’re going to have a lot more skills as far as tumbling and stunting,” McGonagle said. “We’re a team of a lot of girls who have never cheered in their lives before, so we’re starting from scratch with a lot of those things. By football season next year we’ll have a lot more skills, but for what we are now, we’re very prepared.”